29a.ch

What are impulse responses and convolution reverbs?

If you want to evaluate the acoustics of a room you are in, you can clap your hands and listen to the echos and reverberation of the clap. An impulse response is very similar to that. It’s the response of a system to being excited with a short impulse like the clap in the example before. The impulse response can then be used to simulate the sound of the room using a process called convolution.

How to get swirly bokeh with a lens hood?

A similar effect to the one produced by these old lenses can be achieved using a lenshood that restricts the paths light can take into the lens. The swirly effect is essentially created by the opening of the lens hood being to small. This creates mechanical vignetting (also known as cat’s eye bokeh), blocking part of the light from hitting the sensor.

What is left to do?

Performance in noisy environment is still bad. Using the microphone of a macbook the tuner barely works, if the fan spins up a bit too loudly it will fail completely. I’d definitely like to improve this in the future but I also have the suspicion that it won’t be trivial, at least without making additional assumptions about the instrument being tuned.